Space Safety
Observation of 40 000 near-Earth Asteroids
ESA's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC), part of the Planetary Defence Office, has designed a new set of astronomical tools: the NEO Toolkit.
This toolkit is currently composed of four complementary tools, each one focused on a specific goal. With these tools the users will be able to obtain high accuracy ephemerides, precisely locating asteroids and their orbits in the night sky or the Solar System or simulating the close approach of those objects that may come closest to Earth.
This observation of near-Earth asteroids was done using the Orbit Visualisation Tool, which can display collections of asteroids and the Keplerian and perturbed orbits of NEOs in a 3D environment of the Solar System.
